TWO WELL-SUITED representatives of a detail-crazed and consistently top-tier French institution are getting set to fly to Texas to dine with the longtime leader of a detail-crazed and consistently top-tier NBA institution. They help oversee the rarest of commodities, one that dates back to the Middle Ages and is the same color as the five championship trophies that fill the résumé of their soon-to-be host, who, on this early March 2022 night, is one regular-season win shy from becoming the NBA's all-time winningest coach.
For now, Lorenzo Pasquini and Mathieu Jullien ease into their seats at the Terrace Restaurant at the Maybourne Hotel in Beverly Hills. Soft piano music fills the air, overlaid with the cacophony of the busy restaurant. It's a warm night at the end of a long day; each of them had spent the day making the rounds at various respected establishments in Los Angeles to showcase the release of the 2019 vintage of Chateau d'Yquem (pronounced: d-kem), a historic dessert wine from the Sauternes region of Bordeaux. Pasquini is the estate manager at d'Yquem, and Jullien is a marketing and sales director at LVMH, which bought d'Yquem in 1999.
The two men have spent the past several hours describing the wine and answering questions, but now they have some questions of their own, largely about the coach they're en route to see that next night, thanks to an invitation from the man himself. They're certainly familiar with the longtime coach, who is known in France not only for coaching some of its greatest players, such as Tony Parker (and, soon, Victor Wembanyama), but also for being a passionate connoisseur of perhaps its greatest export: wine.
Namely, though, they want to know how Gregg Popovich, who will be inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame on Saturday, has achieved success so often throughout his nearly two-decade run in San Antonio. How does he motivate players? How does he lead?
"For us, truly, managers like him are very much an inspiration," Pasquini tells ESPN. He describes his team at d'Yquem, where dozens of skilled staffers work the famed vineyards to help create the notoriously challenging wine: guiding the growth of branches; trimming overgrown leaves; positioning budding grape clusters for sunlight or shade; accommodating for heat spikes or sudden frosts or excess wind or rain; identifying (and eliminating) any insects or powdery mildew that could threaten a harvest.
Pasquini has never visited San Antonio, and Jullien has never even been to Texas. Their visit will be brief, a midday arrival with plans to depart after dinner to New York. But they're excited, not only because of the man they're visiting but also because of the gift they've brought for him: a bottle of 1949 d'Yquem -- an acclaimed vintage from the same year Popovich was born.
Soon after they land, they join about a dozen attendees at a San Antonio restaurant, featuring Popovich and other Spurs staffers. Topflight wines are shared, and by the end of the meal, glasses cover the table. Popovich, per usual, shares what he has long shared with chefs and others in the hospitality industry -- or any industry -- who seek his counsel about leadership, explaining his long-held philosophy that it's important to build chemistry outside the workplace, especially at the dinner table, where his history of chemistry-forging meals for the Spurs is the stuff of NBA legend.
But as special as the evening is for the two men, it is equally so for Popovich, whose obsession with d'Yquem is almost as prolific as his obsession with food and wine itself.
Indeed, for decades, the occasionally sour head coach has called upon the world's most highly regarded sweet wine. And for many who have poured it for him, and for even some of his players and staff who have noted his affection for it, Popovich's love affair with d'Yquem is especially fitting; the parallels between what he and the winemakers try to achieve year after year align in a way that speaks to deep mutual respect -- of game recognizing game.
SURROUNDED BY THOUSANDS of bottles in redwood racks, Boris Diaw scans Popovich's wine cellar, and his eyes widen at one particular bottle that looks to be the size of a small child. It's Christmas 2001 and Diaw is in San Antonio to visit Parker, who that summer had been drafted by the Spurs. Parker had asked the 6-foot-8 Diaw to visit from their native France, where Diaw was playing professionally, for a holiday dinner held at Popovich's San Antonio home.
Naturally, Diaw, who hails from Bordeaux, held interest in viewing Popovich's deep collection, housed in a recently finished 12-foot-by-20-foot above-ground cellar framed by trees behind Popovich's home. Diaw ventures beyond the entrance, where two pillars raise a limestone sculpture of two men picking grapes, then past the large wooden doors imported from Spain. Before Diaw, in a room cooled to an ideal 58 degrees Fahrenheit, a Spanish chandelier hangs over a large wooden table handmade from fir, which rests on stone tile. Popovich calls this space his "private little hideaway," according to Wine Spectator magazine, but Diaw simply calls it "beautiful," mentally taking notes about how to design his own future cellar. Popovich's cellar was built, the article stated, with a Sisterdale cream stone -- the same golden color as d'Yquem.
Inside, Diaw spots an oversized bottle of wine that carries the same golden hue, one that Diaw believes is the size of an "imperial," which holds the equivalent of eight bottles of wine in one.
It is d'Yquem.
Diaw knows a bottle of that size is not often found in the wild, which is even more true for a Sauternes, which is typically served in small pours to end a meal. The bottle he sees, though, is easily enough to satisfy a large wedding's worth of guests. Seeing the bottle quickly gives Diaw a deeper respect for a coach whom he'd one day play for -- and win a championship with in 2014.
Years later, after his 14-season NBA career had ended, Diaw visited d'Yquem's iconic estate in southern Bordeaux, where a castle-like chateau atop a hill overlooks 300 acres of sémillon and sauvignon blanc vineyards. Diaw met with d'Yquem staffers, who detailed the excruciating and unique winemaking process -- how a fungus (known as botrytis, or "noble rot") grows on their grapes, concentrating sugars to create powerful, complex flavors, but also how that fungus is deeply unpredictable. It spreads unevenly and produces little usable fruit; generally, most vines globally might produce two to three bottles' worth of wine, but d'Yquem's 700,000 vines are said to yield only as much as a single glass of wine -- each.
And so, during harvest, when workers pass through d'Yquem's vineyards, only the ripest and most perfect botrytis-affected grapes are selected. Each grape is plucked by hand.
"If you wait too long, the fungus takes over and it's not good," Diaw tells ESPN. "If you don't wait long enough, it's not ready. It's got to be super precise in the way it's made. It has to be perfect for them to make the wine -- otherwise they won't make it. That's how perfect they want it."
Many harvests around the world are conducted by machine and can last three to five weeks, but d'Yquem's harvest can last weeks longer, with an expanded staff of workers making on average six passes through the vineyards and as many as 13. If the harvest is deemed unworthy to bear d'Yquem's name, no vintage is produced that year, which has happened nine times since 1910 and most recently in 2012.
"Imagine how much money you lose if you don't harvest one year," Diaw says. "But they'd rather put it off than taint their reputation."
That process -- which master sommelier Paul Roberts says places d'Yquem in the "top 0.1%" of the wine world in terms of attention to detail -- is the backbone of d'Yquem's reputation. In 1855, when Emperor Napoleon III demanded the creation of a wine classification system for Bordeaux wines, d'Yquem received a singular rating: premier cru supérieur. And as he toured the estate, Diaw didn't have to think hard to see in their process some of what he had experienced in San Antonio.
"The way they work and their work ethic and everything that goes into it, and also the passion that they have to be the best in the world -- you have to do all that," he says. "You can compare that to a team that wants to be the best in the world and win the championship."
Diaw also sees why Popovich adores a wine specifically known for its ability to age and endure -- beyond simply enjoying it.
"Pop takes inspiration in a lot of different things in different ways," Diaw says. "He is always going to respect somebody that tries to be the best year after year after year."
Says former Spurs assistant and current Jazz assistant Chad Forcier, "He has the same value system, and commitment to detail and to excellence."
Says former Spurs guard Marco Belinelli, "It's exactly the same."
"It really is the perfect wine for him," says master sommelier Bobby Stuckey, whose respected Colorado restaurants have hosted Popovich several times. "Their attention to detail is so maniacal and his attention to detail is so maniacal. They're the perfect human-wine pairing. D'Yquem gets what they're doing, and he gets what he's doing -- and for a long time. I've been around long enough that you see wineries that go through down phases; maybe there's a lack of motivation with the winemaker or the family or whatever.
"D'Yquem doesn't have that lack of motivation, and neither does Popovich."
When these sentiments were shared with Popovich after a 2019 Team USA practice in Los Angeles, he nodded along, leading up to the ultimate question: For as far-fetched as it might've seemed, did Popovich -- who has his own wine label, an Oregon pinot noir -- see some of himself and his own approach to life and the NBA in that wine and the way it was made? Were there parallels?
He didn't hesitate.
"Yes!" he told ESPN with enthusiasm. "Absolutely."
BUT THAT IS all Popovich would say, then and now, leaving others to speak for him about the almost absurd depths of his long-held passion for d'Yquem -- and they had plenty to say.
Consider Spruce, an elite restaurant in the Presidio Heights neighborhood of San Francisco, where Popovich is such a frequent visitor he has a reserved booth. He has polished off many bottles of d'Yquem there, including one day when he enjoyed a half-bottle of the standout 1990 vintage with a burger with seared foie gras and truffle. George Lobjanidze, a sommelier at Spruce from 2016 to 2019, says of Popovich's numerous visits, "nine times out of 10, he would end with d'Yquem." Lobjanidze notes that in his time at Spruce, the only time he ever sold a large-format bottle of d'Yquem was to, you guessed it, Popovich.
"He can speak to every vintage in the last 20 years easily," Lobjanidze says. "He just has a masterful and comprehensive understanding of it."
Says former Spurs assistant P. J. Carlesimo: "He's got so many vintages of [d'Yquem], it's incredible."
Popovich might find a bottle waiting in his hotel room on the road, compliments of a veteran hospitality staffer who knows the coach's specific tastes. Veteran sommeliers know to offer it at the end of a meal, though he's been known to decline if his team just lost a tough game. But when the occasion calls for it, d'Yquem is perhaps the one bottle that he'll want most of all.
In August 1999, after winning his first title as the Spurs' head coach, Popovich brought a 1976 d'Yquem to a small celebratory dinner with some close friends, according to one guest, Jim Peterson, a retired U.S. Air Force pilot and wine writer in Texas.
In 2007, Popovich was reported by CNBC to have bought a 1959 magnum -- a bottle twice the size of a normal one -- for 4,000 euros (about $5,480 then) at the Michelin-starred Paris restaurant Taillevent.
In the fall of 2016, prior to a 12-course, four-hour dinner for nine guests at The French Laundry, a renowned three-Michelin-star destination in the Napa Valley, during one of the Spurs' annual coaching retreats, Popovich arrived early to peruse the extensive wine list with Erik Johnson, then the wine director. "D'Yquem was at the forefront of his mind," Johnson says. "It was the first thing that was selected." Specifically, Popovich ordered a 1945 d'Yquem, which cost $14,750.
At the end of the night, before the cork was pulled, he stood before the room to describe the wine and why it was special, especially given that it was made in the shadow of WWII, when the chateau served as a military hospital.
Such wine orations weren't unusual. In San Antonio, Belinelli learned plenty from Popovich, who loved telling the stories behind a bottle, how it was made, where it came from, what that vintage was like, why it mattered.
"For us, it was like a lesson with a teacher," Belinelli says.
During his 17 years with the Spurs, Parker bonded with Popovich over many fine bottles, but especially d'Yquem. And, like Diaw, Parker has visited the estate in Bordeaux, making nearly a half-dozen trips through the years, including staying at the chateau with his family.
"First of all, they have a great team -- a great team," Parker tells ESPN, describing the staff cultivating the wine. "All the people that work over there, they're super passionate. They know they're blessed to work in a place like that."
Parker's passion for wine only grew during his time with the Spurs and, after retiring in 2019, Parker partnered with Michel Reybier on a Champagne (Jeeper) and a rośe (Château La Mascaronne). When it came time for an early review of the wines, Parker asked Popovich, who returned positive feedback -- and told Parker he wanted to invest. For Parker, that stamp of approval was more than enough. But when it comes to Popovich's all-time favorite wine, Parker knows the answer -- and believes in the parallel.
"When you look at the track record and how consistent we've been for so long, playing at a high level for how many years," he says, "it's very cool."
But Popovich isn't the only big name to fall under the spell of d'Yquem.
Thomas Jefferson visited the chateau in the 1780s and later ordered 250 bottles of the 1784 vintage. In 1859, Grand Duke Konstantin, brother of Czar Alexander I of Russia, paid an astronomical 20,000 gold francs for a 900-liter barrel of d'Yquem, helping establish one of the wine's nicknames: "liquid gold." It was said to be prominently featured in Joseph Stalin's extensive wine cellar. In 2011, an 1811 d'Yquem fetched $117,000 at auction, becoming the most expensive bottle of white wine ever sold.
In a 2006 interview with Wine Spectator, Popovich cracked a window into his own adoration for the wine, joking that the thing that kept him up at night was unrelated to basketball. Instead, it was what would happen to his then-3,000-bottle wine collection, which included imperials of 1990 d'Yquem.
"A vintage in Bordeaux like 2000 or 1990 comes out, so you go get X number of cases and you think, 'How am I going to drink all this before I croak?'" Popovich said then. "Then you end up having nightmares that your kids are going [to inherit the wine], mix it with 7-Up and make sangria." But, Popovich added, "Whether it's ready or not, the d'Yquem is going to get drunk [by me]. Those bottles will not be passed on!"
IT'S LATE ONE evening in November 2007, and Popovich has arrived early to Canlis, a fine-dining establishment located in the Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle. Popovich knows the family-owned restaurant, built in 1950, well, visiting for years whenever the Spurs were in town to play the SuperSonics. Hosting members of his coaching staff, he first sits at the bar and strategizes wines with Nelson Daquip, the wine director, whom Popovich has known for years. "Nelson, this is what it's about," Popovich begins. "You gotta have a game plan if you're gonna have success in life, right?"
Daquip always loves these moments, when the talk about wine leads to something bigger, such as the time he has asked Popovich for the one thing he'd say in the huddle before a Game 7. Popovich grabbed Daquip by the shoulders: "Look around. Everyone here should be playing for each other. If you don't have that, if you don't feel that, you're not going to win."
Here, Popovich rattles off questions for Daquip, searching for wines that are showing well and would pair well with the food. Ever the coach, he favors matchups. First up, a showdown of two different vintages of Krug Champagne: 1990 versus the vaunted 1988. Later, an America vs. France battle of top chardonnay producers, with California's Peter Michael facing off against Burgundy's Domaine Coche-Dury.
Coaches flow into the room, and Popovich, who is months removed from his fourth championship in eight years, greets them as they take a seat at a long table near the window in the main dining room, with a picturesque view overlooking Lake Union.
"Gentlemen, this is what I'm talking about," Popovich tells the group. "This is how you dine. We eat a lot together, but this is how you dine."
The table is covered with appetizers and salads. For wine, a pinot noir showdown -- Oregon vs. France. One coach at the table prefers beer, and Popovich ribs him: "No wine for him, because he's a beer guy, but let's not hold it against him."
The fourth quarter of the meal approaches. Entrees are cleared from the table, but desserts have yet to arrive. Daquip leans over Popovich's shoulder, ready for the next decision. During so many of these dinners, Daquip doesn't exactly know what paths they'll be heading down in terms of wine, as Popovich is always interested in trying something new, something interesting. But to Daquip, whatever journey Popovich happened to take through wine that night, he always ends up back home, at a familiar place he loves.
Popovich wants to talk about d'Yquem.
"Everyone is here," Popovich tells Daquip. "We're having a good time. But that's the end goal. That's the trophy I want to lift at the end. That's my finish, that's my finale."
Canlis has no shortage, with about 15 selections of half-bottles and 15 of full bottles -- and Popovich and Daquip start going through the vintages.
Popovich offers feedback on what he's tried, which vintages he likes and which he doesn't. He says that he doesn't want anything too young or anything he's had recently. They run through the 1990s and 1980s, then move into the 1970s and pause -- on the 1975 d'Yquem, considered one of its top vintages from the decade. "I've had a lot of d'Yquem," Popovich says, "but I want to try something I really haven't had in a long time. I think this is it. I want something that's going to have a darker, warmer spice. I want something with this beautiful candied ginger note but still a lot of acidity. I want freshness. I want this sort of marmalade note.
"On the nose, I want something that I know is old. I want something that smells like it's got some age, that's developed."
The 1975 on his mind, Popovich then makes the call: "That's it. That's the play. Let's do it."
Daquip heads to the cellar, retrieves the bottle and opens it, hoping it's as perfect as Popovich has described. As soon as he smells the wine, he recognizes the notes of honeycomb, butterscotch, orange marmalade, candied ginger and salted caramel popcorn.
Daquip confidently strides toward Popovich, offering the coach a small pour. Time has aged the wine from its gleaming golden tone to an orange-copperish hue, and Popovich observes it in the light, carefully tilting the glass to one side, then smelling it.
The table falls quiet, with all eyes on Popovich. After what feels like an eternity, he turns to Daquip and smiles.
"This is it."
He takes a sip.
"Unbelievable. This is why no one can match d'Yquem."
Just then, the coach known for both his empathy and his temper is transported to a familiar place by a wine considered the perfect balance of sweetness and acidity.
At the end of the night, Daquip saves the empty bottle, keeping it in the Canlis cellar for years.
It would stand next to other bucket-list bottles, all legendary in their own right, but every time he'd pass by the d'Yquem, Daquip would think back to that night.
That bottle had stood the test of time, Daquip would tell himself, just like the coach who had savored it.